Mac Attacks in Final Presidential Debate

John McCain brought the heat to Wednesday night’s final presidential debate, attacking Barack Obama in response to almost every question—on economic stimulus, health care, education, and Supreme Court appointees—asked by moderator Bob Schieffer.

Aggressiveness was called for, with Obama having opened up an eight-point lead in CNN’s “poll of polls”, driven partly by a perception among voters—and hammered home by the Obama campaign—that a McCain win would mean four more years of the extremely unpopular Republican President Bush.

McCain jumped on Obama’s repetition of the McCain = Bush theme on Wednesday. “I am not President Bush,” he said. “If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Obama, who played a lot of defense during the debate, responded, “If I occasionally have mistaken your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people, on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities, you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.”

The final debate in the 2008 campaign, at Long Island’s Hofstra University, gave BU bloggers plenty to talk about.

According to the crew at This is My Party, last night’s debate wasn’t won by Obama or McCain, but by Joe the Plumber, a.k.a. Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who confronted Obama over the candidate’s tax plan during a campaign stop in Ohio, and whom McCain used as a foil in describing Obama’s tax proposals as “class warfare.”

“[Joe] should rename his business, if he can still afford to buy it, after his newly minted persona,” they wrote.

In fact, the candidates invoked Joe more often than they mentioned the word “economy”, although Joe’s instant celebrity status drew media scrutiny about his general dislike (or rather, disregard) of taxes.

There had been a lot of tough talk on both sides leading up to the debate. And while voters always claim to hate negative campaigning, the tactic tends to move poll numbers.

Has the economic crisis changed that equation? BU bloggers were divided.

This is My Party people expected both candidates to “leave it all on the table tonight” and thought that McCain lived up to expectation by going on the attack while Obama stumbled. Obama, they said, was “dodging” and “rambling” during the discussion of negative ads, and seemed “to be getting tangled up in the abortion issue — which actually wasn’t the question that was asked [it was about Supreme Court nominees], but he was the one that took the discussion off-topic.”

The Buck Stop felt that McCain’s aggressive stance made him look “restless and rude,” but acknowledged that the senior senator from Arizona scored a few points. “McCain successfully painted Obama as a classic big-spending liberal for much of the debate tonight. Obama justified each individual spending initiative well but could have done better justifying the big picture of his governing philosophy.”

But Good People Better Rise Up thought Obama scored a slam dunk: “It was obvious from about five minutes in that McCain was going to get crushed.” They dismissed his “Joe the Plumber” references as the “sort of rhetoric that D.C. pundits love” and thought Obama ran away with a victory in his explanation of his link to William Ayers, a former leader of the 1960s and 1970s domestic terrorist group Weather Underground. “McCain did what I hoped he would do. He brought the issue up, handled it in a ham-handed way, and then sat back in silence as Obama set the record straight. In each case Obama got three minutes of free air time to set the record straight. It was a gift that McCain didn’t even understand he was giving.”

In fact, while much of the post-debate analysis said McCain’s intensity gave the Arizona senator his best performance yet, a snap poll by CNN still credited the calmer Obama with the edge.

Likewise, I Don’t Think I Know wrote, “I doubt the debates moved people towards Obama because he convinced people he was more correct about the issues, although I’m sure that played a role for many people. Instead, I have a feeling Obama’s persona was more influential — because when people aren’t sure who is ‘right’ about a specific issue, they turn to other elements, such as personality, image, and character. Obama’s evenhanded (and, of course, ‘cool,’) image looks pretty attractive next to a more aggressive McCain, and even more attractive in the context of a presidential election taking place after eight years of Bush.”

Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu. Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.